Clean My House and Keep It Clean

Our Project with the chores works OK, when everyone is willing to chip in. We’ve been doing it now for almost 2 months, and our house still has some major hurtles. We have a ton of stuff.. Stuff we need now, stuff we might need tomorrow, and stuff (we don’t know when we will need it, but we have it). I guess this is grown out of the mindset that nothing is removed, we just accumulate. This is no way to keep an organized home. Our goal is to buy a set of shelves from Ikea every month and build out a large storage area in our hallway, this might help.
There are tons of processes, when left half done, tend to stay half done until someone starts the process back at the start again. An example would be laundry, if you don’t make a point to run the laundry on a schedule, it just piles up, until it become an huge project. Fitting these type of schedules into our daily lives seems important only to build some kind of habit. Doing it just to do it is really serves no purpose but to force one in to a nervous breakdown. As an engineer, I tend to think in steps to accomplish a task. I just need to map out how things should be done, and enforce the policy.

We don’t live in a very big house, but it seems to be quite cluttered. My wife and I are homeschooling our four children, so we’ve decided that it’s really importaint for them to do chores, and lighten the load of house work. A simple list on the Fridge (Laminated with a dry erase marker) outlines the daily list of items to be done. As each item is accomplished they sign off, and go to the next item. For right now the concept is very novel to them. I expect I’ll have to find a way to keep them motivated, but we are going to keep trying it for about 50 days. I’ve heard that it takes 50 days to make a habbit.

I live in a small home with my wife and four children. It seems we have more clutter than places to sit down. My children have much more than they need, and we are very fortunate to have stuff, but we have more stuff than we need. Of course isn’t that the American Dream—Have too much. I’m sick of the stuff we have, and I really want less. This weekend I started to clean up… just by doing laundry. My kids have too much in the way of clothes. I mean they have a dresser plus under bed storage and closet storage… and they are all full. I just want a clean house. And so I’ve started on my objective, but it looks like it might take a while to cut away at this thing. I’m trying to design processes so things like laundry and clothes tending can be done in an organized fashion, rather than being thrown into piles for the work to be done later.